That Buzz on City Rooftops? Beekeeping Is Going Corporate
Photographer: Barbra Verbij/Gemeente Utrecht
Urban hives are helping companies burnish their green credentials, but there are only so many city flowers to go around.
Luca Matteucci
Bloomberg
January 6, 2022
Excerpt:
The bee-friendly efforts are one part of a broader push to bolster plantings and set aside wild spaces in urban areas across the world. The Netherlands has championed city greening, with residents replacing garden and walkway tiles with bushes and trees. In 2019, the city of Utrecht transformed its 316 bus stops, turning the shelter roofs into boxes planted with pollinator-friendly sedum, a low-maintenance plant that resists dry spells. Designed to meet the code of best practice set by the U.K.-based Green Roof Organisation, these “bee bus stops” also capture fine dust and conserve rainfall. Similar stops are now being built in Leicester, in the U.K., as part of the city’s “Bee Roads” program.
Other bee-embracing cities include Singapore and Ljubljana, Slovenia, which have developed bee paths — like a wine trail, but with attractions that feature “bee hotels” and diverse bee-attracting gardens for the public to view bees up close. In Santiago, Chile, former history teacher Felipe Bastías operates 80 urban beehives that provide the star ingredient in a blonde ale produced by a local brewery. Bastías says he steers some of his honey profits into his program to teach underprivileged local kindergarteners about beekeeping and, by extension, how the natural world can play a role in urban life.
